Melissa Gosling: We jumped right in and started our email campaigns in October – right after school started. We send out newsletters once a month with important and helpful information for our student’s parents.

VR: Do you have any advice you’d like to share with other small businesses about email marketing?

Melissa Gosling: My biggest tip is to make sure the information is timely and relevant to your customers. If they think they will get something useful from the email, they will make sure they read it. But if it has a lot of useless information, you will lose that reader. We use content of our own, and include links to useful information we find on the internet.

VR: What kind of results have you seen?

Melissa Gosling: We ran a customer satisfaction survey in our last newsletter and had some interesting finds:

87% of our respondents said email newsletters are the number one way they stay informed with our business.

98% of respondents said they preferred to use the email newsletter to stay updated (Facebook was second at 25%).

We have been told that people feel much more informed since we implemented the newsletter, and that has greatly improved our customer satisfaction.

Melissa Gosling: We were honored to receive the award, as email marketing is new to us. As a small business we have to watch every nickel and dime that we spend, so it is great news that our results are great – but more importantly that our customers feel taken care of!